Best broadband ISP in NYC (Brooklyn)?
I’m getting down to brass tacks on my move to Brooklyn (just ordered the gas and electric hookup this morning) and I’m ready to set up my broadband account. For the past several years, I have been a happy customer of Speakeasy’s OneLink Select Plus service. It’s more expensive than the Comcasts and Time Warners of the world, but I’ve never had a single problem in four years as a customer, which is remarkable. Here’s what I get:
- 6mbps down / 768 kbps up
- 4 static IPs
- great customer service (very rarely used, but when I call, the person on the other end of the line is smart and empowered)
So, I could re-up with Speakeasy in NY (which I’m leaning towards, but don’t know if their quality is better/worse out there), or I could consider other options. The high-speed Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse services are not available in my area. Any thoughts?
Etsy is looking for a VP of Product
Fred Wilson posted today about Etsy looking for a VP of Product (description here) and described why he believes in Etsy:
There are some companies that are just different, special, and doing something important. Etsy sort of defines that kind of company to me. They are trying to make it possible for creative people to make a living off of the things they make. And in the process, they have built a market where you can find amazing one of kind items that make great gifts or things you can wear with a smile on your face.
When companies say they are “special” and “different,” sometimes they just mean they have a ping-pong table and they let you bring your dog to work. Etsy truly is special and different in a way that one very rarely sees (just search for “etsy addictive” or “etsy love” to see for yourself). I just spent several days in New York, mostly looking for a place to live and working out logistics for my impending move (I officially begin on 9/2), but also spending time with members of the Etsy team. Etsy is unmistakably an Internet company, but one that is connected to basic forms of human expression and social interaction that go back to the beginnings of human economies.
This is an incredibly unique opportunity and someone with whom I would be working very closely. If the people you’ve worked with would describe you as the best product manager they’ve ever seen, send your resume to work@etsy.com.
If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “Etsy and the role sound amazing, but I love the Bay Area,” (or LA or Seattle or wherever you live) drop me a line (chad @ the domain of this blog). I was in your shoes not that many weeks ago. Moving to NY (hell, even to another house within the Bay Area!) seemed almost absurd. I had just begun some major renovations on my house in anticipation of establishing even deeper roots in the Bay Area. I had a great gig at Yahoo! and the phone was ringing off the hook with recruiting calls from interesting companies all over SF and Silicon Valley. My wife and I felt very established in the area after 10+ years, with a great group of friends and we enjoyed regularly running into people we knew walking around SF. On a purely mundane level, I had even ordered something fairly large (i.e. the kind of thing you wouldn’t move cross-country) online that would be delivered in three weeks just days before I visited Etsy. By the time that package arrived, I had already announced my decision. I was that inspired by Etsy, and am even moreso after this recent visit.
Fire Eagle launches
Fire Eagle launched today. My favorite and most succinct quote in the extensive coverage about Fire Eagle was on VentureBeat from Mike Malone 
(developer at Pownce, one of the launch partners): “Location is hard, Fire Eagle is easy.” Very simply, Fire Eagle makes it simple for developers to build a wide array of location-aware applications and services without dealing with the hard parts.
The developer side is only half the story, though. For end users, Fire Eagle delivers on privacy. When Fire Eagle first went into beta back in early March, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb really nailed the importance of Fire Eagle’s focus on end user privacy in combination with the developer platform:
Yahoo! put privacy right out front. Many people want their data to be portable from service to service and many people want that to include their location data from mobile or other interfaces. I personally don’t want my location broadcast automatically, at all, to anyone thank you very much. Fire Eagle has privacy and user control of data written all over it.
Users have the option to hide themselves with a single click, they can click to purge all their data from the Fire Eagle databases, the service even lets you select how often you’d like to receive an email reminding you that it is tracking your location as asking you to confirm that you want tracking to continue. By default you’re emailed once a month for consent to be reconfirmed! Hello trust building measures! It’s almost enough to make me interested in exposing my location, selectively.
. . . .
Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service.
Indeed. Check out the Application Gallery to see what kinds of applications are being built around Fire Eagle. I’m sure the number will be growing quickly in the coming weeks and months, and I’ll be watching.
In any case, a huge congrats to the Fire Eagle team is in order — nice work!
Carroll Gardens: my new home in Brooklyn
After what I’m told is by NY standards an unusually short search for a place to live (it was the second place we looked and on our first day of looking), we found a place in Carroll Gardens, one of our favorite neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Our place is the top floor of a brownstone built around 1900, similar to the ones you see in the photo at the bottom of this post. I’ll be out here (i.e. NY) for good by September 1.
The landlord is very friendly and lives three doors down (we signed the lease at her kitchen table, which was filled with photos of her with her family). We were warmly welcomed to the neighborhood by both the merchant at the corner store and the kind folks at Moonshine (which is officially in Red Hook, but a short walk).
All in all, it’s been a surprisingly delightful experience after I had spent the last few weeks bracing for a brutal apartment search. Since we booked over a week in NY, we are using the found time to catch up with friends here and do the kind of things you do in New York. While we still have to pack up our stuff back in the Bay Area and move cross-country, knowing exactly where we’re going to land makes the whole process a lot simpler.
(Photo of Carroll Gardens district by Fecki, brownstones by wallyg)
And in the end. . .
Today is my last day at Yahoo! and last night what I thought was going to be a small gathering of friends for drinks at 21st Amendment blew up into a bona fide party. At some moment during the party, I realized that four former Brickhouse leaders were all there (Scott Gatz, Salim Ismail, and Bradley Horowitz), then the Beatles popped into my head, and then I remembered the crosswalk out on 2nd Street that I’ve walked through so many times. Hmmmm. . . . .
Within minutes, I had gathered Scott, Salim, and Bradley outside and I started taking my shoes off. Bradley looked up the real Abbey Road cover on his iPhone while we were standing in the middle of the street. Sara Wood stopped traffic briefly and Ricky Montalvo took the shot (and later made it incredibly stylish). I can’t imagine a more memorable and playful image to mark the end of my time at Yahoo — thanks, Bradley, Salim, Scott, Ricky, and Sara!
Leaving Yahoo!
I’ve thought a lot about how to begin this post, but it’s best to get right to the point (especially in light of the speed of Techcrunch). I’m leaving Yahoo! to pursue another very exciting opportunity: joining the Etsy team as CTO. I’ll save my thoughts on Etsy for later, but for now I will say that Etsy and the community it serves are all-around inspiring and I can’t wait to jump in.
(See the blog post from Etsy).
I really couldn’t be more thankful for my experience at Yahoo and to the people who made it such an amazing journey, or more excited about the next chapter in my career and life. I had an amazing run. Long-time readers of this blog might remember that I literally proclaimed one of my three years at Yahoo! as the best year of my life. In the past, I’ve told people that I’ve had all of the best jobs at Yahoo, and I have: running the Hack program, the Yahoo! Developer Network (where I had the privilege of working with the Pipes and MyBlogLog teams, too), and now Brickhouse, where we shipped both Yahoo! Live and the Fire Eagle beta. It has been an unbelievable experience. Yahoo! is a great company full of incredible people.
In each of those roles, I’ve had a unique opportunity to get to know many people inside and outside of Yahoo! Literally hundreds of people were helpful and supportive of me at Yahoo! so I am reluctant to list names. I spent a few hours on a list of people to thank and realized when I hit 150 that it was too unwieldy — the list included everyone from well-known execs to the groundskeepers who made sure the lawn sprinklers didn’t come on during Open Hack Day. Feeling gratitude to so many people is definitely a high-class problem. It amazes me that so many of the folks at Yahoo! shared their personal talents and gifts with me so profoundly. You know who you are and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
In leaving, I’m confident that Brickhouse is in good shape. The product teams (Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live) are focused and cranking. Brickhouse continues to attract new talent and strong support from Yahoo! management. I’m pleased to be handing the reins over to Mike Folgner, who was CEO of Jumpcut, where he took Jumpcut from idea to product to acquisition by Yahoo! The team won’t miss a beat without me. Tom Coates , Eric Fixler, and the other folks on the team are rock stars.
If you’re familiar with Etsy, you know they are in New York. Brooklyn, to be exact. That means I will be moving to New York. On a personal level, the quiet tug back east has been persistent recently. My mother-in-law passed away in mid-May, my first loss of someone I cared about so deeply. At the same time my mother was battling a terrible illness and spent a few months in the hospital back home in NC, only to be cured by a last-ditch treatment. When miracles happen, it changes your perspective. And how can you go wrong living in New York? To quote John Lennon in the recorded version of his not-quoted-very-often song “New York City,” — “what a bad-ass city!” That pretty much sums it up.
I’ll be in the Bay Area for a few more weeks before heading out to New York. To my Bay Area friends and colleagues, you have given me so much in my time here, I can’t thank you enough. The time I spent out in California this past ten years has literally been life-changing. To my New York friends, I look forward to reconnecting. To quote a famous New Yorker, “today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
WordPress meetup at Y! Brickhouse Wednesday night
We’re hosting a WordPress meetup at Y! Brickhouse this Wednesday night, July 2. If you’re planning to come, go sign up on Upcoming. See you there!
The Art of Capacity Planning
I’m really excited about John Allspaw’s forthcoming book, The Art of Capacity Planning (available in as-it-is-being-written form on O’Reilly’s Safari Rough Cuts with an estimated publication 
date of October 15, 2008). To put it mildly, John is a rock star (literally!) and anyone who spends any time making web sites run should reserve a space on your bookshelf for this one. I’ve been a direct beneficiary of his knowledge in the last two companies I worked for before Yahoo, and now as a colleague at Yahoo, where John runs ops for Flickr. Here’s how John describes his book and his approach in the preface:
This book is not about building complex models and simulations. It’s not about spending time running benchmarks over and over.
It’s about practical capacity planning and management that can happen in a real world. It’s about using real tools and being able to adapt to changing usage on a website that will (hopefully) grow over time. When you get a flat tire on the highway, you could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what popped your tire, or you can get on with it, pop on the spare, and keep on going.
That is the approach to capacity planning that I’m suggesting: adaptive, not theoretical.
Having been in the trenches with John on a number of occasions, I can vouch for his approach. I’m reading the early chapters now and look forward to the rest.
As a related aside, John just gave a talk at the Velocity conference that you should check out: Capacity Management for Web Operations.
(Photo of John by me in July 2005)
We’re hiring at Brickhouse in SF!
We’re hiring at Brickhouse, our San Francisco office at the corner of 3rd and Bryant, where there are lots of great things happening. If you like working on small startup-like teams to deliver products like Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live and invent entirely new things, then check out the openings below. If you’re interested, email me (chad @ this domain) and tell me why you’re perfect for one of the roles.
- Software Engineer, Brickhouse (you will be working on Fire Eagle initially)
- Community Manager, Advanced Products / Yahoo! Live
- Flash Developer, Yahoo! Live
(Photo from our very own Tom Coates)
NetSquared Mashup Challenge: Hack Day for non-profits and NGOs
Over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, I wrote about something I’ve been helping out with and supporting in recent months, the NetSquared Mashup Challenge:
I wanted to draw your attention to an organization that I and Yahoo! have been supporting that you might want to support, too — NetSquared. The goal of NetSquared is simple: to help hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) successfully utilize the empowering capabilities of the Internet to increase their impact and achieve social change.
N2Y3 Mashup ChallengeFor the first time, NetSquared is running a really cool program called the Mashup Challenge in which they are matching up ideas from non-profits and NGOs involved in all sorts of social change to people like you (i.e. developers, product managers, and designers) who have the skills to implement them. I have been helping NetSquared promote the Mashup Challenge (see their recent YDN Theater video) because I think it’s a very practical roll-up-your-sleeves way of getting people to work together across many boundaries (company, international, etc) to produce something exciting and useful that benefits the world at large. It’s very much in the spirit of our own Yahoo! Hack Day.
To really boil it down, if you are a web builder/developer/designer, you can use these rare skills to make the world a better place. Read the rest if you would like to pitch in as a project leader! For more about NetSquared, check out the YDN Theater video below.